Richard Serra (1938–2024)

Sculptor Richard Serra, whose massive rusted-steel works transformed physical and psychological space, died on March 26 at his home in Orient, New York, of pneumonia. He was eighty-five. His lawyer, John Silberman, confirmed the artist’s cause of death to theNew York Times. Serra over the course of a six-decade career split both public spaces and public opinion with monolithic sculptures that commanded attention even from those who would prefer to ignore them, shunting approaching viewers inside and around their titanic forms, typically triggering a visceral response. “The thrill induced by Richard Serra’s sculptures doesn’t come from the sense that they might crash down at any moment,” wrote Anthony Byrt forArtforumin 2008. “It occurs due to the delicate manner in which they stay up, and the subtle way Serra manages to bend our experience around them.”

Richard Serra was born in San Francisco on November 2, 1938, the middle son of a pipefitter father from Mallorca, Spain, and a Russian Jewish mother from Odessa. On his fourth birthday, he was taken by his father to the shipyard to watch a tanker launch. The sight of the heavy vessel slipping into the water, where all weight seemed to leave it as it floated effortlessly, had a profound effect on him. “All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory,” he toldBOMBmagazine’s David Seidner in 1993. Serra began working summer jobs in steel mills at fifteen. Encouraged by his mother to draw, he did so incessantly as a boy, but on attending college studied English literature, first at the University of California, Berkeley, then at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from which he graduated. On the advice of painter Howard Warshaw, under whom he’d studied at UCSB, he submitted a set of drawings to Yale and was admitted to the school’s fine arts program, where he studied painting alongside classmates Brice Marden and Chuck Close.

At Yale, he met fellow artist Nancy Graves, whom he would eventually marry. The two traveled Europe spending time in Paris, where they become close with composer Philip Glass, and where Serra’s appetite for sculpture was whetted by visits to the studio of Constantin Brâncuși. In 1966, while living in Italy, Serra encountered Velázquez’sLas Meninasat the Prado in Madrid and promptly gave up painting. “I looked at it for a long time before it hit me that I was an extension of the painting,” he toldThe Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan in 2008. “This was incredible to me. A real revelation. I had not seen anything like it before and it made me think about art, and about what I was doing, in a radically different way. But first, it just threw me into state of total confusion.”

Serra responded to his bewilderment by turning to sculpture, first making works influenced by the Italian Arte Povera movement that was then insurgent. For his inaugural solo exhibition, at Rome’s Galleria La Salita in 1966, he showed sculptures comprised of stuffed and living animals in cages. Shortly thereafter, back in New York, he began working with materials including latex, rubber, neon tubing, and fiberglass. The looming direction of Serra’s oeuvre is limned in his 1967Verb List, a two-page handwritten list of infinitives, such as “to roll,” “to crease,” and “to fold,” and—as Julian Rose points out in a 2020 Gagosian catalogue accompanying the artist’s 2019 “Forged Rounds” show there—just a single noun phrase: “of gravity.”

His works of this time evince his interest in that very matter as suggested, for example, byWhite Neon Belt Piece, 1967, a tangle of vulcanized rubber and neon tubing drooping from the wall. Another material Serra began experimenting with in the late ’60s was lead, notably melting it and flinging it against the wall, where it hardened into what he described as “splash” pieces. HisVerb Listand his work with lead opened the door for his breakthrough sculptureStrike: To Roberta and Rudy, 1969–71, an eight-foot-high sliver of hot-rolled steel protruding from a corner and spanning twenty-four feet, dividing the room and forcing the viewer to walk around it to apprehend it. A 1974–75 work,Delineator, featured a colossal steel plate flat on the floor and another suspended above, drawing the viewer’s gaze. “You’re not actually there to see the metal,” art historian Richard Shiff, director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas, told theWall Street Journalin 2015, speaking of Serra’s early works. “You’re there to feel the space with the help of Serra’s sculpture.”

Having fallen in love with video and performance artist Joan Jonas, Serra divorced Graves in 1970. Over the next decade, he created a number of site-specific outdoor commissions that drew the viewer’s attention to the landscapes in which they were situated. Exemplary of this type of work arePulitzer Piece: Stepped Elevation, 1970–71, outside St. Louis, andShift, 1972, outside King City, Ontario. The first features low, wide steel plates set upright at intervals determined by the topography of the land, each appearing as a kind of horizon to the viewer. The second work is similar, but is made of concrete rather than steel. Landscape works would occupy Serra all his life, his sculptures of this nature scattered across the globe and growing ever more monumental, as evinced for example by 2014’sEast-West/West-East, comprising four roughly forty-six-foot-high steel slabs set across a little more than half a mile of Qatari desert.

In 1981, Serra married art historian Clara Weyergraf, who survives him on his death. That same year, Tilted Arc, perhaps his most famous work, was installed in Foley Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Standing twelve feet high, the gracefully curving 120-foot long sheet of rusted Cor-Ten steel bisected the plaza and, in contrast with his landscape works, which cast attention upon their surrounds, drew the viewer’s eye like a magnet. Response to the sculpture was mixed and passionate: The artist later recalled seeing the work plastered with posters reading “Kill Serra.” The sculpture was removed in 1989 following a public hearing. Serra sued the government in an attempt to have it restored to the plaza, but was unsuccessful.

Despite—or perhaps in part owing to—the fate suffered by Tilted Arc, Serra continued to garner public commissions, among them the towering Fulcrum, 1987, adjacent to London’s Liverpool Street station; and Berlin Junction, 1987, a set of bowed steel plates outside the city’s Kunstforum. The ’90s found him embracing deeper, more generous curves, as embodied by his “Torqued Ellipses,” 1996–99; “Double Torqued Ellipses,” 1997–1999; and Snake, 1996, all of weathered steel. Placed within an institution or museum, such works seemed to welcome visitors into their confines, evoking a vast and comforting stillness. As the millennium dawned, Serra turned to solid volumes, his work becoming even heavier, as typified by Equal, 2015, a set of eight forty-ton forged steel blocks, and Nine, 2019, a group of forged-steel cylinders varying from roughly the height of a toddler to that of a pro basketball player. “Weight is a value for me,” he told Gagosian in 2019, “not that it is any more compelling than lightness, but I simply know more about weight than about lightness and therefore I have more to say about it.” 

Among the many awards the artist received during his lifetime are Tokyo’s Praemium Imperiale, France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, and the Getty Museum’s J. Paul Getty Medal. His work is held in the collections of numerous institutions around the world, ranging from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, to the Guggenheim Bilbao. As well, numerous cities lay claim to his public sculptures, among them Chicago, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, and Reykjavík.

Serra’s philosophy regarding his art was as spare and elegant and, one might say, as heavy as his works themselves. “I don’t give a shit,” he told The Guardian, “but I care quite a lot.”